Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-zc66z Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-09T16:39:46.564Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Medium access in wireless sensor networks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2014

Mohammad S. Obaidat  and
Sudip Misra
Mohammad S. Obaidat
Affiliation:
Monmouth University, New Jersey
Sudip Misra
Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Technology
Get access

Summary

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) use the same medium (which is the air) for wireless transmission that the nodes in a wireless local area network use. In order for nodes in a local area network to communicate properly, standard access protocols like IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.4, and ZigBee, are available. However, these and other protocols cannot be directly applied to the wireless sensor area networks. The major difference is that, unlike the devices participating in local area networks, sensors are equipped with a small source of power (usually a battery), which drains very quickly. In addition, sensor nodes have limited resources of memory and computational power. Hence, there is a need to design new protocols for medium access control (MAC). This chapter investigates some of the major MAC protocols available [1–7].

Medium access control in wireless networks

There exists a very good set of standard protocols for wired and wireless area networks, which are proven to operate efficiently. There are many reasons for not using the wired and traditional wireless MAC protocols for WSNs. The standard protocols in wired local area networks use the well-known carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) scheme for individual stations to access the medium. This protocol, the IEEE 802.3, is known as Ethernet [1–46]. In this scheme, each station senses a medium for a random amount of time. If no activity is detected it starts its own transmission. If it detects any activity in the medium it defers its transmission until the activity ceases. If it senses a collision of packets from different nodes in the networks it backs off a random exponential amount of time and then starts contending for transmission using the backoff exponential algorithm. Slotted ALOHA networks traditionally use a time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme [9–10]. In this scheme, the time is divided into an equal number of slots such that a node is allowed to transmit only in its allotted slot. Here, the disadvantage is that a node is allowed to transmit if and only if it owns the slot; otherwise it has to listen to the medium for the data intended for it. Therefore, if the node has no data to send the bandwidth is simply wasted because there will be no activity for the amount of slot time allotted to a node with no data.

Type
Chapter
Information
Principles of Wireless Sensor Networks , pp. 48 - 75
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ramachandran, C., Obaidat, M. S., Misra, S. and Pena-Mora, F., “A secure, and energy-efficient scheme for group-based routing in heterogeneous ad-hoc sensor networks and its simulation analysis,” Simulation: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International, Vol. 84, No. 2–3, pp. 131–146, Feb./March 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Misra, S., Tiwari, V. and Obaidat, M. S., “LACAS: learning automata-based congestion avoidance scheme for healthcare wireless sensor networks,” IEEE Journal on Selected Area on Communications (JSAC), Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 466–479, May 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marco, A., Casas, R., Sevillano, J. L. et al., “Synchronization of multi-hop wireless sensor networks at the application layer,” IEEE Wireless Communications, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 82–88, Feb. 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Misra, S., Kumar, M. P. and Obaidat, M. S., “Connectivity preserving localized coverage algorithm for area monitoring using wireless sensor networks,” Computer Communication Journal, Elsevier, Vol. 34, No. 12, pp. 1484–1496, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chalak, A., Misra, S. and Obaidat, M. S., “A cluster-head selection algorithm for wireless sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems, ICECS 2010, pp. 130–133, Athens, Greece, Dec. 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dhurandher, S., Obaidat, M. S., Jain, G., Ganesh, I. Mani and Shashidhar, V., “An efficient and secure routing protocol for wireless sensor networks using multicasting,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Green Computing and Communications, Green Com 2010, pp. 374–379, Hangzhou, China, December 2010.Google Scholar
Dhurandher, S. K., Obaidat, M. S., Gupta, D., Gupta, N. and Asthana, A., “Energy efficient routing for wireless sensor networks in urban environments,” in Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Web and Pervasive Security (WPS)-GlobCom 2010, Miami, FL, 2010.Google Scholar
Hill, J., Szewczyk, R., Woo, A. et al., “System architecture directions for networked sensors,” in Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pp. 93–104, Cambridge, MA, USA, Nov. 2000.Google Scholar
Stemm, M. and Katz, R. H., “Measuring and reducing energy consumption of network interfaces in hand-held devices,” IEICE Transactions on Communications, Vol. E80-B, No. 8, pp. 1125–1131, Aug. 1997.Google Scholar
Pottie, G. J. and Kaiser, W. J., “Embedding the internet: wireless integrated network sensors,” Communications of the ACM, Vol. 43, No. 5, pp. 51–58, May 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sohrabi, K. and Pottie, G., “Performance of a novel self organization protocol for wireless ad hoc sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the IEEE 50th Vehicular Technology Conference, pp. 1222–1226, 1999.
Demirkol, I., Ersoy, C. and Alagöz, F., “MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks: a survey,” IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 115–121, April 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woo, A. and Culler, D., “A transmission control scheme for media access in sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 7th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Vol. 6, No. 5, pp. 221–235, Rome, Italy, 2001.Google Scholar
Heinzelman, W., Chandrakasan, A. and Balakrishnan, H., “Energy-efficient communication protocols for wireless microsensor networks,” in Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, Vol. 8, Jan. 2000.
van Hoesel, L. and Havinga, P., “A lightweight medium access protocol (LMAC) for wireless sensor networks: reducing preamble transmissions and transceiver state switch,” in Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Networked Sensing Systems, pp. 205–208, Tokyo, Japan, 2004.Google Scholar
Nieberg, T., Dulman, S., Havinga, P., van Hoesel, L. and Wu, J., “Collaborative algorithms for communication in wireless sensor networks,” in Workshop on European Research on Middleware and Architectures for Complex and Embedded Systems, Pisa, Italy, April 2003.Google Scholar
Ye, W., Heidemann, J. and Estrin, D., “An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks”, in 21st Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE INFOCOM, Vol. 3, pp. 1567–1576, June 2002.
Johnson, D. and Maltz, D., “Dynamic source routing in ad hoc wireless networks,” in Mobile Computing, Imelinsky, T. and Korth, H., Eds., Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 153–181, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mansouri, V., MohammadNia-Awal, M., Ghiassi-Farrokhfal, Y. and Khalaj, B., “Dynamic scheduling MAC protocol for large scale sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems Conference, Nov. 2005.
Sinopoli, B., Sharp, C., Schenato, L., Schaffert, S. and Sastry, S., “Distributed control applications within sensor networks,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 91, No. 8, pp. 1235–1246, Aug. 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callaway, Jr E.., Wireless Sensor Networks: Architectures and Protocols, Auerbach Publications, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liu, Y., Elhanany, I. and Qi, H., “An energy-efficient QoS-aware media access control protocol for wireless sensor networks,” in Proceedings of IEEE MASS 2005.
Heinzelman, W., Chandrakasan, A. and Balakrishnan, H., “Energy-efficient communication protocol for wireless microsensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Vol. 8, p. 8020, January 2000.
Iyer, R. and Kleinrock, L., “QoS control for sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Vol. 1, May 2003.
Rajendran, V., Garcia-Luna-Aceves, J. and Obraczka, K., “Energy-efficient, application-aware medium access for sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Sensor Systems, Nov. 2005.
Rajendran, V., Obraczka, K. and Garcia-Luna-Aceves, J., “Energy-efficient collision-free medium access control for wireless sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, Nov. 2003.
Hill, J., Szewczyk, R., Woo, A. et al., “System architecture directions for network sensors”, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), ASPLOS 2000, Cambridge, November 2000.Google Scholar
Cho, Y., Bao, L. and Michael, T., “LAAC: a location-aware access control protocol,” in Proceedings of the 2006 Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking & Services, pp. 1–7, July 2006.
Hightower, J. and Borriello, G., “Location systems for ubiquitous computing,” in IEEE Computer, Vol. 34, No. 8, pp. 57–66, Aug. 2001.
Raviraj, P., Sharif, H., Hempel, M. and Ci, S., “An energy efficient MAC approach for mobile wireless sensor networks systems communications,” in Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Computer Systems and Applications, pp. 370–375, 2005.
Ye, W., Heidemann, J. and Estrin, D., “An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 2200 IEEE INFOCOM, pp. 1567–1567, June 2002.
Pham, H. and Jha, S., “An adaptive mobility-aware MAC protocol for sensor networks (MS-MAC),” in Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems, pp. 558–560, October 2004.
Cao, H., Parker, K. and Arora, A., “O-MAC: a receiver centric power management protocol,” in Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, pp. 311–332, 2006.
Polastre, J., Szewczyk, R. and Culler, D., “Telos: enabling ultra-low power wireless research,” in Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Information Processing, PSN 2005, pp. 364–369, April 2005.
Zheng, R., Hou, J. and Sha, L., “Asynchronous wakeup for ad hoc networks,” in Proceedings of the 2003 ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing, pp. 35–45, 2003.
Zheng, T., Radhakrishnan, S. and Sarangan, V., “PMAC: an adaptive energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, April 2005.
Weinmann, S., Kochhal, M. and Schwiebert, L., “Power efficient topologies for wireless sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Parallel Processing, ICPP 2001, pp. 156–163, Valencia, Spain.
Hill, J. and Culler, D., “Mica: a wireless platform for deeply embedded networks,” IEEE Micro, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 12–24, Nov.–Dec. 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mainwaring, J., Polastre, R., Szewczyk, R., Culler, D. and Anderson, J., “Wireless sensor networks for habitat monitoring,” in Proceedings of 2002 ACM International Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications, pp. 88–97, Sept. 2002.
Kredo, K. and Mohapatra, P., “Medium access control in wireless sensor networks,” in Computer Networks Journal, Vol. 51, pp. 961–994, 2007.
Nicopolitidis, P., Obaidat, M. S. and Papadimitriou, G., Wireless Networks, Wiley, 2003.Google Scholar
Obaidat, M. S. and Boudriga, N., Security of e-Systems and Computer Networks, Cambridge University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zheng, J. and Jamalipour, A., Wireless Sensor Networks: A Networking Perspective, Wiley, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×